America’s decisive victory in Desert Storm may have also planted the seeds of future military defeat. Watching American forces dismantle the Iraqi military convinced Chinese military analysts that they could not compete with the United States tank for tank or plane for plane. The lesson learned was that America had a decisive advantage in integrating advanced information technologies by linking GPS, satellite communications, and electronic warfare into fast, precise kill chains and tightly coordinated command and control.
The 2026 National Defense Strategy still reflects confidence in American military dominance, yet China has spent the intervening years designing the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to exploit the vulnerabilities of America’s warfighting system. PLA writings on systems confrontation and systems destruction warfare view an army not just as soldiers and platforms, but a living network with eyes (intelligence), a brain (command), nerves (communications), and fists (firepower). Rather than confronting U.S. strength directly, Chinese strategy targets the seams that hold this network together across contested littorals, orbital space, information environments, public opinion, and legal domains.
Even though the U.S. pioneered the use of advanced information technology in war, its vision has failed to evolve. It is still organized around warfighting functions that attempt to group related tasks and capabilities into neat bins. That framework was powerful for building and managing an industrial age army, creating clear staff lanes and simplifying planning. It also fragments responsibility for the very connective tissue the PLA intends to attack. When our command and control, ISR network, logistics web, or information posture is under coordinated pressure, no one below the combatant commander is formally responsible for the health of that system as a whole. We field the world’s most lethal collection of functions, yet the PLA fields an integrated system designed to decouple them.
The U.S. Army should stop organizing its forces and doctrine around warfighting functions and instead adopt warfighting systems as the primary way it designs and fights. By a warfighting system, this article refers to an end‑to‑end architecture of people, processes, networks, authorities, and tools built around a specific operational outcome, such as decision advantage, rather than a single warfighting function. In practice, a warfighting system pulls components from multiple functions into one whole that can be measured, owned, and adapted at speed. This article proposes a first step: a pilot of an integral, self-sufficient information warfighting system, built around a dedicated “system-owner” construct, to close the most dangerous gap in the near term and provide a blueprint for broader change.
System‑centric Adversaries, Function‑centric Forces
Systems confrontation is the core operating concept for how the PLA thinks about war. Their doctrine starts by mapping the opponent as an interconnected architecture, then identifying bottlenecks where a single disruption affects multiple functions. This could be as simple as blinding one key radar or discrediting one legal agreement to stall an entire deployment.
For the PLA, “information” in this model goes well beyond communications and IT. It is embodied in their “Three Warfares” (public opinion, psychological, and legal warfare), which are built into their systems‑confrontation concept. Public opinion warfare works to define the narrative of a crisis before it begins, psychological warfare aims to induce hesitation among decision makers, and legal warfare wraps physical moves in legality. In practice, when Chinese maritime militia surround a disputed shoal, party propagandists, cyber units, legal teams, and diplomats move together as parts of one operational design. The PLA’s core lesson from Desert Storm was to adopt an information‑first strategy: degrade, disrupt, and destroy U.S. information systems and wage psychological warfare against commanders, politicians, and societies while protecting their own. To achieve this, they’ve oriented themselves to use a system‑of‑systems model, reinforced by reforms that elevated information forces into the Cyberspace Force and Information Support Force, giving Beijing a blueprint for how to attack and defend information architectures at scale.
The U.S. Army warfighting functions create stovepiped silos of excellence. This construct works for quickly generating warfighting capabilities, but it is vulnerable against an adversary that designs campaigns to attack the links that connect these capabilities together. While U.S. operational concepts have recognized the importance of integrating cyber and electronic warfare with kinetic strikes, influence and cognitive effects are still treated differently. Efforts to facilitate this integration through dedicated structures, such as Theater Information Advantage Detachments (TIADs), are noble attempts, but their effectiveness is constrained by limited resourcing, narrow delegated authorities, and a scoped responsibility that cannot rewire how other organizations operate, nor eliminate the latency imposed by units traditionally organized.
Further, the U.S. military has inadvertently institutionalized a divide between conventional and irregular warfare by housing the primary influence and cognitive capabilities—such as Psychological Operations and Civil Affairs—within Special Operations Forces (SOF). This creates a structural disconnect where conventional units often treat cognitive warfare as an afterthought or a "bolt-on" enabler rather than an integrated component of their campaign design. Because SOF and conventional forces rely on different funding authorities and report through separate command structures, interoperability suffers. In contrast, China’s systems approach erases the artificial boundary between conventional and irregular warfare, seamlessly blending public opinion, psychological, and legal operations into a single, unified campaign design. In this war of systems, the critical question isn’t just “How lethal is my artillery?” but also “Who’s protecting our information posture, legal position, logistics, and narrative with allies when a crisis breaks?” In most U.S. headquarters, the answer to “Who owns this system?” is currently either “everyone” or no one.
Functional Forces in a Systems Fight
The gap becomes noticeable when you zoom in on any single U.S. headquarters at the division level or higher. At the headquarters, warfighting functions translate into staff sections, a Napoleonic staff architecture that made sense for the industrial‑age, that view war as parallel activities rather than as an integrated system. Each lane works meticulously, but independently. In today’s information-age, minutes and hours matter in the modern battlefield, yet every action has to fight through stovepipes, coming together periodically at separate working groups or deconfliction boards, and wading through approval chains built for a slower, linear fight.
From a systems perspective, the flaw is not that functions exist; it is that they fragment ownership of the connective tissue the PLA is targeting. In today’s fight, the decisive terrain is often the links: the pathways that connect sensors to shooters, analysts to decision makers, and leaders to allies and publics. When those pathways are treated as everyone’s problem, they effectively become no one’s problem. Responsibility to see, decide, communicate, and explain diffuses across intel, operations, communications, fires cells, public affairs, and legal staff without resting firmly anywhere. That pattern is not unique to the U.S. military; PLA headquarters leverage a similar staff architecture with intelligence, operations, political-legal, and communication elements that integrate warfighting functions. The key difference is that PLA reforms have overlaid those staff functions with system-level owners, such as the Information Support Force, that are explicitly charged with designing, defending, and employing the information architecture as a single operational system.
From Functions to Systems
The U.S. Army should rewire its organization to compete with adversaries like the PLA, which have spent three decades wiring its forces to fight as an integrative system, and up to this this point have operated uncontested in the “gray zone” below the threshold of conflict. The most urgent place to start is information. An Information Warfighting System stops treating information as a loose collection of enablers and instead consolidates them into a purpose-built system with the mission to give commanders decision advantage and impose decision paralysis on the adversary.
Today, information capabilities are scattered across the staff. Intelligence own pieces of collection and analysis; fires own targeting; signal and network elements run the infrastructure; psychological operations, cyber, electronic warfare, and space support sit in specialized corners; public affairs and legal advisors operate under their own authorities and sensitivities. Each is essential, but none is responsible for whether the force can see clearly, think coherently, act quickly, and explain itself under pressure.
A hypothetical Indo‑Pacific crisis exposes the problem. Maritime militia “fishing vessels” pack key straits and chokepoints, signatures spoofed as harmless commercial traffic, while staged near‑collisions and “accidents” produce a constant flow of videos that paints U.S. ships as the reckless ones. Deepfakes of supposed U.S. strikes on civilians hit regional media and closed chat groups within hours, wrapped in selective legal arguments that cast routine freedom‑of‑navigation ops as unlawful aggression, just as cyber-attacks on ports, airfields, and movement systems begin corrupting lift schedules and injecting false tracks into air and maritime radar.
Inside the JTF, the battle rhythm fills with working groups and coordination boards. On paper these are chances to synchronize, but most work still happens inside separate sections, with separate priorities—PSYOP teams trying to shape behavior, public affairs guarding credibility and access, cyber and electronic warfare focused on defending and attacking in cyberspace, and the lawyers policing authorities and risk— that competing for intelligence support or inputs into the targeting cycle. From the commander’s perspective, those siloed efforts land like friction on the trigger. PSYOP pushes a surrender appeal while public affairs blocks release of corroborating imagery. Cyber and EW lock down pathways that could have been used for influence or deception against adversary High Value Targets. Lawyers are buried in case‑by‑case reviews so targets of opportunity slip away. Convoys roll on routes sustainment still shows as green but protection has just flagged as high risk, and Rules of Engagement stay tighter than planned because yesterday’s viral video never got a coordinated answer. Meanwhile, a PLA organized around an integrated information system uses those same hours to blind, slow, and isolate U.S. formations before they can ever land a coherent punch.
The information fight alone demands roughly eighteen distinct tasks. Today those tasks are spread across at least a dozen different owners, including J2, J3, J6, J39, PSYOP units, cyber and EW elements, public affairs officer, staff judge advocate, civil affairs, space and cyber components, country teams, and higher agencies, which means no one below the four‑star owns the performance of the information system as a whole and the JTF experiences them as latency, gaps, and friction instead of as a single weapon system tied to combat power at the edge.
What the Army has done in response is bolt on more information‑branded units instead of changing how the existing formation fights. Multi‑Domain Task Forces, TIADs, and various “fusion” cells have added capacity and put more information professionals on the map, but they sit on top of the same scattered eighteen‑task, twelve‑owner architecture that no one below the four‑star is responsible for as a whole.
An Information Warfighting System starts by changing who sits together and who owns the fight. Instead of twelve different sections or organizations living in separate offices and “coordinating” through boards or working groups, they are pulled into a permanent Information Directorate under one leader, who answers directly to the commander and whose job is to own information outcomes end to end, from combatant command down through JTF and Corps. Think of an ad‑hoc Information Warfare Task Force but wired in as a standing section of every major headquarters, with analysts, planners, operators, lawyers, communicators, and partners on the same floor working one battle rhythm and one assessment process so those eighteen information tasks behave as one vertically integrated system instead of a patchwork of ad‑hoc teams.
This sounds like a massive shift in how commands are organized, but precedents already exist. In the late 1990s, U.S. Special Operations Command was re-organized from a traditional J‑staff into five ‘Centers,’ including an ‘Intel & Info Ops’ center that fused information related functions into a single staff section responsible for understanding and weaponizing information. It demonstrated that integrating information as a staff‑level system is possible at the combatant command level.
A recent example is the Information Warfare Task Force-Afghanistan that was stood up in Bagram between 2018-2020. Unlike a standard J39 that is only responsible for coordinating information capabilities and competing with other staffs for the attention of the J3, the IWTF-A fused PSYOP, cyber, space, intelligence, data analytics, and digital advertising under a single commander with unified authorities—replacing parallel staff lanes with one targeting and assessment cycle, and giving it direct access to the decision maker for rapid effects. Lessons-learned documents and publications concluded that this framework, closely tied to maneuver, is necessary to compete and win in Multi-Domain Operations, and provided the catalyst for the creation of TIADs and additional IWTFs.
In the Indo‑Pacific crisis, that architecture shows its value through a six‑function framework. As militia “fishing vessels,” deepfakes, and cyber-attacks on movement data hit, the system:
- Senses and Understands by fusing ISR, SIGINT, HUMINT, OSINT, partner reporting, and media monitoring into a single picture
- Protects and Secures friendly networks, signatures, and narratives while putting deception cover in place
- Shapes and Influences with commander‑led informing, PSYOP activities with feedback mechanisms, and synchronized partner messaging that pre‑empts PLA lawfare and reassures the public
- Competes and Controls by blinding PLA sensing and driving strike packages into U.S. kill boxes
- Assesses and Adapts using behavior tracking, and feedback data.
- Integrates and Converges information actions with maneuver, fires, protection, and sustainment
Instead of friction, last‑minute partner refusals, and self‑deterred ROE, the JTF sees cleaner tracks, faster release chains, more resilient logistics, and allied publics that stay with the coalition, turning information from overhead chatter into a generator of combat power.
Designing Our System Before the Next War
China is building operations around blinding our eyes, numbing our nerves, and confusing our brain so that our unmatched capabilities never land a coherent punch. A U.S. Army that remains conceptually anchored in warfighting functions and siloed staffs will struggle to keep pace in that fight, no matter how lethal its platforms are.
Moving to warfighting systems is about deciding who is responsible for designing, protecting, and employing the systems that the PLA actually plans to attack. An integrated Warfighting System that gives one senior leader and one integrated team the mandate to own the information fight end‑to‑end will help the Army see more clearly and act more coherently under pressure than the current model. At a minimum we will have forced more integration into the fight our adversaries contest every day. Optimally, it will give us a concrete pattern to organize and fight, opening the door to other critical systems over time. The real choice is whether we rewire our operating system on our own terms now or wait until an adversary forces us after we have already paid in blood and treasure in the opening weeks of a war we might otherwise have deterred or quickly won.
Major Ryan Walters is an active-duty U.S. Army Psychological Operations (PO) Officer with operational experience integrating PO, Intelligence, and other Information Capabilities in support of joint, sister service, and Army commanders. He is currently a graduate student at the National Defense University’s CISA-JSOMA program, where his current research diagnoses the “why” behind the build-disband-rebuild cycle of U.S. Information capabilities and institutions. He has previously published multiple articles in Small Wars Journal covering such topics as Information Warfare transformation and Cognitive Warfare.
Main Image: Members of 8th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) working with the Fleet Information Warfare Command-Pacific, U.S. Pacific Air Forces, Pacific Marine Corps elements, and multinational partners as part of a Joint Information Warfare Task Force during KEEN EDGE ’24. The Warfighting System concept employed by the Joint Task Force was acknowledged by senior leaders within USINDOPACOM as pivotal for contesting peer adversaries, both in competition and LSCO. Image taken by the author.
If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, Department of the Army, Department of War, or the United States Government.
